Monday, August 12, 2013

August 12

Delaware native Andrew Sords (b. 1985) is a concert violinist whose
performance track record belies his age. Andrew has already appeared as
soloist with more than 100 orchestras and has performed on noted recital
series across the U.S., Europe, Australia, Korea, Canada, the
Caribbean, Mexico and Central America.

He is a featured soloist on every track of New Age composer Sean
Christopher’s latest album, “Transcendence” (2013, CD and MP3 formats).

Andromeda (violinist Andrew Sords):

But Andrew’s bread and butter lies with the performance of classical
music repertoire. He is also an openly gay man. Based in Cleveland, Mr.
Sords has performed with the Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra (the first
GLBT orchestra in America, founded more than 20 years ago) and another
GLBT ensemble, the Atlanta Philharmonic Orchestra (founded in 2004). On
June 28, 2014, Sords will perform the Tchaikovsky violin concerto with
the Atlanta Philharmonic as part of the Atlanta Pride celebration, so
we'll have a gay violinist soloing with a gay orchestra performing a
concerto by a gay composer (Tchaikovsky) at a gay festival. Awesome.

Notably, Andrew has been profiled in “Lavender Magazine” (Minnesota’s
GLBT biweekly) and Pittsburgh’s “Out”, a GLBT monthly tabloid
publication. However, Sords is known to a much wider audience through
mainstream venues such as NPR’s Morning Edition and Sirius XM Radio.

Sords performs on a Belgian violin built by Augustine Talisse in 1912,
with strings exclusively provided by Warchal, Inc. (Slovakia). Andrew
plays with a nineteenth-century French bow from the workshop of
Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume.

In January Sords will headline the 2014 Moscow Mozart Festival with
concerti and chamber music performances, immediately followed by a
return engagement with the Pro Musica Chamber Series of San Miguel,
Mexico. When I conducted a telephone interview with Mr. Sords for this
blog post, he had just returned from Fairbanks Alaska, where he was a
featured performer in the city’s Summer Arts Festival. So successful is
his career that these days he is booked for approximately two years in
advance.

Mr. Sords was the featured violinist in a documentary on violin
technique. He was honored by Pulitzer Prize nominated composer Kellach
Waddle, who dedicated his violin sonata to the young violinist. In 2006
Andrew commissioned a violin concerto from composer Evan Fein and
recorded it with the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra.

Strongly committed to extending classical music to everyone, Andrew
dedicates a portion of his time at almost every engagement to
educational outreach, master classes and community programming.

Andrew Sords is represented by EMC Artists, Ltd., and you can learn much
more about him (and even read his tantalizing blog) at: